How soon until we see the API & interfaces for the new multi-touch
trackpad on the MacBook Air? Obviously the existing mouse events do
not provide enough information to describe using this new hardware.
When this question was asked on Carbon-Dev, the poster was told it
would be made available in 10.6.
I recommend you file bugs and request this API to change Apple's
mind, because that certainly is too long to wait.
OTOH, it may be best to wait. AFAIK, there's only a certain set of
canned gestures right now and basically just one Mac model that would
benefit of any mods to 3rd party software. Apple may thus be waiting
to see just what other gestures may be needed (perhaps making that
extensible somehow?). And, also waiting for more models to be out in
the field.
When filing enhancement requests, folks may also want to think about
what other types of gestures their app would benefit from. That may
help Apple solidify the working set of gestures that apps will
ultimately be able to tap into.
It will be very interesting to see just how other vendors approach
this technology too. For example, on my Mac Pro, I obviously do not
have a track pad. But I do have a Wacom tablet. Would I eventually
be able to use multi-touch via that? Same goes for a touch-screen.
Finally, when filing the enhancements, definitely mention what types
of APIs you'd like. For example, the only way to currently work with
Ink events is to use Carbon APIs. I don't have an issue in doing
this, but it would have been easier to also have higher-level Cocoa
APIs to work with. Using the low-level APIs I have to do some
interesting things with coalescing ink events in order to get a single
NSString with all recognized data. A higher-level Cocoa API could do
this heavy-lifting.
